Media objects are physical or electronic recordings or representations of information, thoughts, or emotions. People have created and used media objects for thousands of years. Recently, technological advancements have enabled a great proliferation of media objects and an increase in exchange of media objects amongst people. This exchange of media objects is frequently facilitated by summaries of media objects. For example, a movie may be recorded in digital form and sold over the Internet to people who wish to view the movie. Typically, the prospective movie buyer examines many possible movie choices and selects only a small number. This selection process determines the commercial success of the moviemakers. To increase the number of people who choose their movie, the moviemakers typically create “trailers” or short sequences of excerpted footage from the film to tempt people to get the entire movie. These trailers condense the much larger media object into a new media object that summarizes the larger media object. The creation of the summary can be as much an art form as the creation of the original media object.
The movie trailer concept has analogs in many forms of media objects. Without the concept of a summary, search and selection of media objects would be greatly impaired. For example, the back cover or dust jacket of a book often describes the story line, exciting attributes about the author, and praise from other people for the book's value. As another example, search engines generate short textual excerpts from the web pages and other documents that match a user's search request. These excerpts summarize the contents of the document. Image and video search engines similarly endeavor to produce summaries of the content of the media objects sought by their users.
Often, a summary is implemented in the same kind of medium as the media object that it describes, e.g. the text of a book is often summarized by text on the dust jacket, and a miniature clay figurine may summarize the gestalt of a large stone sculpture. However, this is not always true of summaries, e.g. a talk show host might verbally summarize the story line of a book, which is a textual media object. A recording of the talk show host would be a media object that summarizes the book.
A defining attribute of a summary is that it contains less than all the content of the media object. However, summaries sometimes introduce new information that is not present in the original media object. For example, a talk show host might render opinions of a book, or a movie trailer might arrange its excerpts in an order that communicates a particular idea that is not obviously present in the movie itself.
Generally, a summary is clearly associated with the media object that it summarizes. This association is often achieved by presenting the summary visually adjacent to a means of accessing the media object that it summarizes. For example, a summary generated by a search engine is usually presented near a hyperlink to the media object that the search engine is providing in response to a user's search query. As another example, the summary in a dust jacket is physically bound around the book it summarizes.
With the advent of automated analysis techniques that glean information from digital media using computer algorithms, some summaries are partially or totally generated without the aide of a human. A now-famous task in the engineering discipline of natural language processing is “automatic summary generation.” Automatic summary generation is usually thought of as a text analysis process, however the resampling and resealing of an image to generate a smaller version of an image is another type of automatic summarization. Such summary images are often called “image thumbnails” because in comparison to the larger image, the summary image could be as small as the nail material on the end of a human's thumb. While possibly hyperbolic, this gives a sense of the scaling down and condensing of information involved in summarization.
Summaries also exist in cartography. Making a more general map of a place on Earth from information provided by a detailed map has been a central activity of cartographers for centuries. The act of creating a map at lower scale than an original more detailed map requires careful judgment about which features to remove and which to include. Typically, this is called “cartographic generalization” in the sense that the detailed specific features of a high-scale map must be made more general and less specific for display at a lower scale. Frequently, large-format, high-scale maps are presented with a small-format, low-scale summary map or “overview” map showing the position of the large-format, high-scale map within a larger geographic area that maybe more easily recognized by viewers than the smaller physical area described by the large-format, higher scale map. These overview maps are usually much smaller format than the main map for which they provide an overview. These maps offer both a summary and more information by showing surrounding areas of the world. Such overview maps are an example of a summary that is the same general type of media object as the media object that it summarizes.
Geographic maps have been used in conjunction with other media objects for hundreds of years. For example, a map showing the positions of events or other geographic features can be presented along with text describing the events or locations. Historians or journalists describing a time period or set of issues in a place often make such narrative maps by annotating a map information, such as text and images, relating to locations within the map.
With the advent of computers, digital media objects have taken on many new forms.